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| Just checking in. Been a while.
The second week of my three-week run of Gypsy at the Ivoryton Playhouse is coming to a close. It's funny; in Follies of Grandeur, I played the stage manager of a strip club, and now I'm playing the stage manager of a Burlesque house. I have found my niche, apparently. The difference is that Gypsy is the show about stripping that you can take your grandmother to. Unfortunately, I don't sing or dance in the show; I play several smaller parts. I didn't even intend to audition for it, but the theatre kept my resume on file after my Beauty Queen audition and called me up. Better to work than not work, and it had been so long since I was involved with a musical that I decided to give it a whirl.
Rehearsals for Macbeth with Shakespeare on the Sound start on Tuesday. I'll be playing Lennox. That'll give me my outdoor Shakespeare fix for the summer (and some Equity points - bonus). As that run wraps up, I'll be starting rehearsals for Twelfth Night with Shakespeare Ventures. Playing Feste. Elated/terrified.
Megan and I close on our new condo on June 12th! Ka-boom. Farewell to rent! Visitors will be most welcome towards the end of the summer, once we've had a chance to redo the floors and paint. It's kind of a rescue mission in a sense; its current owner has unfathomably awful taste, and we'll need to perform an interior design exorcism of sorts.
Anyway, nothing pithy here. Just a "Hey, Y'all" to y'all. My schedule prevents me from being able to make it to Lear, so I wish all of you who are involved with that a great run. I hope to see you at some point! | | |
| So, Follies is done. We had a pretty good run; the East Village is an awesome place to perform. It's a community that has a real devotion to supporting the arts, and by God, if you're doing a play, they're coming to see it. We had good houses throughout the run, even on Thursday nights and on that Sunday when we got slammed by the blizzard. Closing night was perhaps our best house, and the executive director of the theatre took notice and proposed bringing the play back in the fall (insert sound of cash register here). We'll just have to wait and see about that, though.
I only saw two reviews of the play. The first was very kind, so much so that you have to wonder if the reviewer was somebody's friend. But nice remarks are nice remarks. Then Backstage came. It's weird to be written up in Backstage, let me tell you. I got a nice mention, but I feel like some of my castmates got a bit slighted. Fortunately, they weren't slighted by name, but still. Whatever, it's one person's opinion.
Megan and I are officially on the hunt for a house. Megan is off this week because Connecticut schools are closed for winter break, and so yesterday she called a loan officer to see what exactly our chances of ever being able to buy a house are. It turns out that banks are much more willing to lend us money than we would have suspected, and we can borrow tons more than we thought. So bring on a house! Bring on my basement recording studio! Bring on our emancipation from the two stupidest landlords in the history of landlordship! Finally!
Wall blop.
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| Four jobs I’ve had:
* Three Pigs Barbecue dishwasher
* Blockbuster Video clerk
* house painter
* children's museum floor staff manager
Four movies I can watch over and over:
* High Fidelity
* The Shawshank Redemption
* Singin' in the Rain
* The Commitments
Four books I can read over and over:
* Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
* Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman (Zach, I'm such an ass; I still haven't given this to you for your birthday, which was, like, six months ago)
* Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
* Our Dumb Century: 100 Years of Headlines from America's Finest News Source by the staff of The Onion
Four places I’ve lived:
* Annapolis, Maryland
* Deerborn, Michigan
* San Diego, California
* McLean, Virginia
Four TV shows I love:
* The Wonder Years
* Cheers
* That's pretty much it.
Four places I’ve vacationed:
* County Mayo, Ireland
* Corolla, North Carolina
* St. Lucia
* Breckenridge, Colorado
Four favorite places I’ve been in the world:
* Bonn, Germany
* London, England
* Wall, South Dakota
* New Orleans, Louisiana
Four of my favorite foods:
* sushi
* guacamole
* natural chunky peanut butter
* hommus
* I love all food.
Four websites I visit daily:
* http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/baseball (The Baltimore Sun's Orioles page)
* https://mail.google.com/mail (My e-mail)
* http://games.yahoo.com/games/cw.hf2k (Yahoo! Crossword Puzzles)
* http://webmail.att.net (My other e-mail that I don't like to use any more but still check every day. Apparently.)
Four places I would rather be right now:
* I'm cool with where I am right now, at home with my coffee. However, in an hour-and-a-half, when I am in a Kindergarten classroom at one of our local public elementary schools, this list of places I would rather be will know no limit.
Four bloggers I am tagging:
* It'd be nice to hear from Zach, Sean, and Pip, since none of you has written anything in months. Also, I tag Unlikely Pete. | | |
| Here is the postcard for my show:
And here is where you can buy tickets: http://www.theatermania.com/content/show.cfm/show/117991
The girl in the postcard looks a bit like Lady Percy, doesn't she?
Things are going pretty well. I've been journaling privately a lot about the show, which is why I've been less active on this blog. We're supposed to be off book this week for scene work, but we also just got new revisions, so that complicates things a little bit. I don't get naked anymore, but other people still do! (Just in case nudity was a condition of attendance for some of you.)
However, I do take off my shirt. Which is why I'm going to the gym right now. | | |
| So I landed a show for the new year. It's a new play called "Follies of Grandeur" which will receive its premiere at Theater for the New City down in the East Village this coming February. This is exciting on a couple of levels. First, it's my first New York job. Second, it's actually in Manhattan. Third, it's a premiere. Fourth, this is the theatre that premiered fucking "Buried Child," for God's sake. Fifth, I'm the male lead. It's probably exciting on more levels, but I don't know them yet because we don't start rehearsals until January 3rd.
The show is about a place in Hollywood called the Ivar Theater, which was a legitimate theatre until the 1970s, when it went under and resurfaced as a House of Burlesque. But it was really seedy, even as Houses of Burlesque go. My character was the spotlight operator, janitor, and de facto manager, and he tells the story. Because the show is in the Village, there's going to be tons of T&A, and I have a love scene that just might require me to bear it all, too. Not sure about that, but it's definitely possible. Which I'm okay with, but damn, did it have to be in February, when I'm at my flabbiest and most pallid? It's right after the holidays, and I'm not going to have any time to go to the gym...Boo.
Another thing that kind of sucks is that I won't be able to attend the Sigur Ros show at MSG. I'm still going to give the tickets to Megan, and I'm going to urge her dad to go with her. My father-in-law is a cool man. He loves concerts and has taken us to a lot of really good ones over the years, most notably my first Dylan show and Dar Williams. So I figure I can repay him with this.
So, the show runs February 2nd through February 19th, Thursdays through Sundays. If anybody coming to Sigur Ros on the 9th wants to make a pre-weekend out of it, you can come to one of New York's most venerable hell-holes and see this show. I hope it will be good.
We finished shooting that movie yesterday, finally. We'd been working on it for over three months, off and on, and it was time to be done with it. I have no idea when it will be edited and ready to view, though. Probably a couple of months. Now I can start growing my hair back out, which is good.
After the shoot, I took one of the kids I work with to see Chicken Little. We were late because the shoot ran over time, but I got him a pretzel and some popcorn, and he seemed to have a really good time. He'd already seen it before anyway, but I felt awful for getting him there late. He was really well-behaved, I must say! Most kids can be placated with treats from the refreshments counter, I suppose.
Hope anyone reading this is well. Merry Christmas! | | |
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